How there Could be Reasons for Affective Attitudes
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How there Could be Reasons for Affective Attitudes Alexander Heape 1 Accepted: 14 July 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Barry Maguire has recently argued that the nature of normative support for affective attitudes like fear and admiration differs fundamentally from that of reasons. These arguments appear to raise new and serious challenges for the popular ‘reasons-first’ view according to which normative support of any kind comes from reasons. In this paper, I show how proponents of the reasons-first view can meet these challenges. They can do so, I argue, if they can successfully meet some other well-known challenges to their view: distinguishing between right and wrong kinds of reasons, distinguishing between reasons, enablers, and defeaters, and providing an account of the relation between reasons and rationality. Whether proponents of the reasons-first view can meet these other challenges remains controversial. I do not try to settle these questions here, but rather show that the debate about the nature of normative support for affective attitudes is not going to be settled in isolation from them. Keywords Reasons . Fittingness . Normativity . Affective attitudes In a recent article, Barry Maguire (2018) argues that there are no reasons for affective attitudes; attitudes like blame, admiration, enjoyment, and so on. Maguire claims that this is so, not because there is no normative support for them, but because the nature of normative support for affective attitudes differs fundamentally from that of reasons. The import of this claim is fairly straightforward. If Maguire is right, then what he refers to as the ‘dogma’ that all of normativity comes from the normativity of reasons, the so-called reasons-first view, is false. In response, David Faraci (2020) has argued that Maguire’s arguments simply fail to establish his claim, since none his observations about affective attitudes and their normative support are incompatible with the reasons-first view. Even if Faraci is right about this, however, the central problem raised by Maguire’s arguments remains. As I will argue, even if these arguments do not rule out that reasons somehow provide normative support for affective attitudes, they put pressure on proponents of the reasons-first view to explain how
* Alexander Heape [email protected]
1
Section for Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
A. Heape
reasons are supposed to support affective attitudes. My aim in this paper is to show how that work can be done. This discussion holds some good news and some bad news for proponents of the reasonsfirst view. The good news is that the relevant explanatory work can actually be done. The bad news is that it does not come for free. Specifically, my claim will be proponents of the reasonsfirst view can explain Maguire’s central observations about affective attitudes and their normative support if they can distinguish between right and wrong kinds of reasons, if they can distinguish between reasons, enablers, and defeaters, and i
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